Wednesday, October 31, 2007

This story is so incredible, I had to do additional research to confirm that it was indeed true. It centers on Kansas City auto mechanic and inventor Johnathan Goodwin.

Two years ago, Goodwin got a rare chance to show off his tricks to some of the car industry's most prominent engineers. He tells me the story: He was driving a converted H2 to the SEMA show, the nation's biggest annual specialty automotive confab, and stopped en route at a Denver hotel. When he woke up in the morning, there were 20 people standing around his Hummer. Did I run over somebody? he wondered. As it turned out, they were engineers for GM, the Hummer's manufacturer. They noticed that Goodwin's H2 looked modified. "Does it have a diesel engine in it?"

"Yeah," he said.

"No way," they replied.

He opened the hood, "and they're just all in and out and around the valves and checking it out," he says. They asked to hear it run, sending a stab of fear through Goodwin. He'd filled it up with grease from a Chinese restaurant the day before and was worried that the cold morning might have solidified the fuel. But it started up on the first try and ran so quietly that at first they didn't believe it was really on. "When you start a diesel engine up on vegetable oil," Goodwin says, "you turn the key, and you hear nothing. Because of the lubricating power of the oil, it's just so smooth. Whisper quiet. And they're like, 'Is it running? Yeah, you can hear the fan going.'"

One engineer turned and said, "GM said this wouldn't work."

"Well," Goodwin replied, "here it is."

And what's the bottom line for Goodwin's modified vehicles? Stuff like this:

Goodwin's feats of engineering have become gradually more visible over the past year. Last summer, Imperium Renewables contacted MTV's show Pimp My Ride about creating an Earth Day special in which Goodwin would convert a muscle car to run on biodiesel. The show chose a '65 Chevy Impala, and when the conversion was done, he'd doubled its mileage to 25 mpg and increased its pull from 250 to 800 horsepower. As a stunt, MTV drag-raced the Impala against a Lamborghini on California's Pomona Raceway. "The Impala blew the Lamborghini away," says Kevin Kluemper, the lead calibration engineer for GM's Allison transmission unit, who'd flown down to help with the conversion.

Remember -- Detroit tells us it's impossible to increase gas mileage without taking a hit on horsepower. Yet here's Goodwin -- with an eight-grade education -- able to design motors that blow the doors off the conventional (and obviously bullshit) wisdom.

His latest project?

Goodwin leads me over to a red 2005 H3 Hummer that's up on jacks, its mechanicals removed. He aims to use the turbine to turn the Hummer into a tricked-out electric hybrid. Like most hybrids, it'll have two engines, including an electric motor. But in this case, the second will be the [jet] turbine, Goodwin's secret ingredient. Whenever the truck's juice runs low, the turbine will roar into action for a few seconds, powering a generator with such gusto that it'll recharge a set of "supercapacitor" batteries in seconds. This means the H3's electric motor will be able to perform awesome feats of acceleration and power over and over again, like a Prius on steroids. What's more, the turbine will burn biodiesel, a renewable fuel with much lower emissions than normal diesel; a hydrogen-injection system will then cut those low emissions in half. And when it's time to fill the tank, he'll be able to just pull up to the back of a diner and dump in its excess french-fry grease--as he does with his many other Hummers. Oh, yeah, he adds, the horsepower will double--from 300 to 600.

"Conservatively," Goodwin muses, scratching his chin, "it'll get 60 miles to the gallon. With 2,000 foot-pounds of torque. You'll be able to smoke the tires. And it's going to be superefficient."

He laughs. "Think about it: a 5,000-pound vehicle that gets 60 miles to the gallon and does zero to 60 in five seconds!"

And here's the punchline:

Goodwin's work proves that a counterattack is possible, and maybe easier than many of us imagined. If the dream is a big, badass ride that's also clean, well, he's there already. As he points out, his conversions consist almost entirely of taking stock GM parts and snapping them together in clever new ways. "They could do all this stuff if they wanted to," he tells me, slapping on a visor and hunching over an arc welder. "The technology has been there forever. They make 90% of the components I use."

The problem with Detroit isn't the laws of physics, it's the fact that a guy who never even went to high school can do things -- with stock parts -- that Detroit's auto executives and their armies of engineers claim is impossible. Good ol' American know-how and ingenuity is alive and well, just not where we need it.

And here's the video of a '65 Impala smoking a Lambourghini:

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If I hadn't seen it I wouldn't believe it. There HAS to be a catch.

(Turbine/Electric hybrid? Isn't that essentially a Batmobile? If it isn't, it damned well should be. somebody call Christopher Nolan!)

As a political matter, I don’t understand why he would essentially try to undermine the first big victory progressives won against the Bush administration and the rightward tilt of the Beltway consensus.

This isn’t 1992. The DLC isn’t the Democratic party’s leading edge. The center isn’t somewhere between Joe Lieberman and Jon McCain. I can’t understand how Obama can be this out of touch.

Obama has always leaned a bit towards the DLC consensus, so this isn't a gigantic surprise. Paul's still absolutely right in asking why ANY Democrat would question the signature Democratic policy success of the decade. It won't win him primary votes, and it sure as hell wouldn't help him in a prospective general, so what's the story?

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Now that I have your attention, here's a post about non-communist China.

Over at Andrew Leonard's "How the World Works", on Salon, there was a nice discussion of the threat that COMMUNIST CHINA! might or might not pose to the United States. This was prompted by a Nation piece by John Feffer that made the comparison between the United States' arrogance and lack of understanding of coming threats (which will cause its fall) and Imperial China's arrogance and lack of understanding of coming threats (which caused its fall.)

One problem: bad history.

Yes, as the Qing historian at Jottings from the Granite Studio describes in exquisite detail, Imperial China did not, in fact, ignore the British threat. They were dismissive of that threat, but they were dismissive of that threat when it wasn't one; in the late 18th century when the Brits were doing all they could to try to hang on to those blasted rebel colonies in North America, and in the early 19th when the Napoleonic Wars were absorbing rather a lot of Britannia's time and energy.

The Chinese were also fully aware of British technological innovation throughout the 18th century too. They were doing just fine, thank you, on the whole "using gunpowder to make metal go through people's insides" thing. What really screwed things up was British gunboats, and those came pretty much came out of nowhere long after England and China met and had all their little "issues".

But even that wasn't necessarily what won the day for England. The other little factoid that often gets overlooked, though not by Jottings: the British Empire hooked China on opium. Yes, yes it did. That's why you subconsciously associate opium with China: because the British put it there. That sucked silver and other goods out of China as everybody and his dog tried to pay for his opium fix, and played merry hell with Chinese society and economics. It was "The Wire" times about a million or so.

The British probably didn't even need the gunboats to begin with. The opium smugglers won the day for 'em.

Anyway, for anybody who cares about Chinese history prior to the creation of COMMUNIST CHINA! I'd highly recommend the post at Jottings. The Feffer piece isn't that bad either. Just, apparently, a little ahistorical.

I haven't read Conscience of a Liberal yet, but I'm wondering if I even need to. This is really reminiscent of the consensus that liberal bloggers have been groping towards for years:

I gather from some of the correspondence I’ve received about The Conscience of a Liberal — mainly, I think, from people who’ve heard me on the radio but haven’t yet read the book — that there’s some confusion over the book’s theory of modern American politics. Some people seem to think that I’m saying that racism and the other issues I classify as “weapons of mass distraction” are what movement conservatism is about. They aren’t.

What the movement is about is economics: the core goal is, as Heritage says in its fundraising letters, to roll back the New Deal and the Great Society — or as Grover Norquist puts it, to get things back to the way they were “up until Teddy Roosevelt, when the socialists took over.”

Race and other distractions aren’t the goal, they’re a tactic — they’re how an anti-populist movement wins elections.

The 2004 election was a perfect example. Bush won by portraying himself as the nation’s defender against gay married terrorists — then, immediately after the election, declared that privatizing Social Security was his first priority.

Yep. The Theocons have caught on, too. That's why Rudy is catching such hell from 'em. They think he'll pay lip service and then run away as fast as he can.

Though I would caution Paul not to overstate the role of economics in the movement. There is a social component as well, but it has far less to do with forwarding religion and far more to do with making "conservatism" the only acceptable political position within American society, with all that that entails.

(Chiefly the dominance of father figures in society, as Lakoff pointed out. If they just cared about low taxes and meritocracy, they'd be Libertarians. Ron Paul's pathetically low poll numbers show they aren't.)

It also involves a very, very expensive type of foreign policy based on American triumphalism. That also distinguishes American conservatism from other brands, including its Continental namesake. You shouldn't forget that, either.

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

...is that, when not backing a racist waste of skin like Mark Steyn, he (occasionally) has a point.

(He can supposedly run a war room pretty well too, although baiting fundamentalists isn't exactly a new thing for him, so he was a good choice for that Ontario thing.)

The legislation in Quebec is indeed odious, forcing all elected officials to be French speakers, even in parts of Quebec that are dominated by English-Speaking Quebeckers. (Yes, they exist. Generally in Montreal.) It's definitely worth opposition.

Not only is this legislation borderline unconstitutional, but it's actually received a wee bit of criticism, even among the sometimes famously nationalistic French-speaking Quebeckers. Not surprising, and a credit to the Quebeckers. What is surprising is that the only response from the Government has been a single comment by their House leader, Peter Van Loan.

Now, let's dwell on that for a minute.The NDP and Liberals have been quick to criticize, and the criticism is coming from party leaders and significant MPs in Quebec. The Tories? Just Van Loan, a non-Quebecker. Stephen Harper, on the other hand, doesn't breathe a word. Stephen Harper dictates the positions of everyone in the party. He IS the party. He holds more power than Dick Cheney did at his prime. And he says nothing? Nor, in fact, do any of his Quebec MPs?

Van Loan can claim to speak for the Government, but let's be honest- if nobody from Quebec is openly opposing it, Harper is praising with faint damnation.

Kinsella said that this was an issue that Dion could use against Harper. Even if Kinsella backed away from this based on a single non-Quebecker's statement of opposition, he wasn't wrong. Dion needs to burnish his federalist cred and remind Quebeckers of why federalism is important and how the Conservatives are willing to sell out to hardcore nationalists at a moment's notice?

Well, here's the issue.

Go nuts, Stephane.

Edit: Perhaps not so xenophobic after all? Not Stephen, of course, but the Quebec National Assembly, which is apparently none too pleased with the bill and likely to just shut it down. Good news.

I had kind of predicted it way back when. The Kurds' independence was going to be seen as an open invitation to try to carve an independent Kurdistan out of Turkey, Iran and Iraq, and there was absolutely no way that Turkey would go along with it.

What I wasn't expecting was that the PKK would engage in such nakedly terroristic activities that Turkey would be able to justify what they were doing. I had thought that mild expansionism would bring a nasty crackdown. Instead, we get the PKK kidnapping soldiers, killing civilians, and in general driving the Turkish people into frenzied screams for Kurdish blood.

(Kind of reminiscent of the Israel-Hezbollah brouhaha, but without the actual state existing, like in Lebanon.)

Then again, why wouldn't the PKK do exactly what they're doing? They're counting on the U.S. to prevent any real sort of retaliation, and it looks like they're getting their wish. The Americans don't want to see Turkey go into Kurdish Iraq in a big way, because they don't want the single success story of the war to collapse in war. They especially don't want pessimists like to have been right (again) and so are going to work to try to keep the peace in Iraq. What does the U.S. care, except perhaps in the broadest of terms, about what's going on in Turkey, compared to the security of their pet state in the region?

Besides, Turkey doesn't want to lose its western trade relations. The U.S. knows this. That's a huge stick to keep the Turks in line, one that America will be relying on, and many Americans might think is decisive. It won't affect the PKK, though; like all the best rebel groups, they've got a primary resource to rely on, and they can be sure the trade will come to them, no matter what the U.S. says. America can hold back the Turks, but it can't hold back the PKK.

Where this ends, I'm not sure. Turkish elites really won't want to antagonist the U.S., but they may not have a choice. The Turkish people are already incredibly angry, and at some point, the regime itself might be in some amount of danger, and will act. No matter the cost in trade.

Featuring, not in this order, anime opening and closing credits; the 1963 pop hit “Sukiyaki”; new business models for pop music; “piracy” on YouTube; Fullmetal Alchemist; fansubbing then and now; the author’s first SLIP account, obtained in the course of reporting on otaku in San Francisco in 1993; the Japanese band Asian Kung-Fu Generation; young Japanese women in bikinis throwing cream pies at one another while riding rocking horses; and, in Singapore, a public protest, in defiance of local law, featuring Ultraman figurines bearing signs reading “The Freedom To Download Fan Subbed Anime Is The Right of All Sentient Beings.”

Only connect!

Oddly enough, this last bit is a real political/legal issue in Singapore. Andrew Leonard touched on it, but I'll fill it out a bit.

Anime has a huge audience outside of Japan, and a lot of Japanese anime companies still seem a little surprised and bemused by this; especially because Anime plays a tiny second fiddle to Manga in Japan, whereas outside Japan the reverse is true. They've never been sure how to handle these markets, so they generally haven't bothered.

The practical upshot is that a lot of series are either never subtitled and/or dubbed for release outside of Japan, or are so terrible as to be worthless. Enter fansubbers, who record the shows, subtitle them, and distribute them themselves as well. These people were vital back when the only anime on television was Sailor Moon, and considered what they were doing legal, because there was no license for the anime; and anyway nobody ever got sued over anime. They still don't, not really. Fansubbing is controversial, but a lot of the big anime companies got started with fansubbing, and the community that buys anime as a genre is still small enough that you don't want to alienate them. Everybody recognizes that without these people, anime would not really exist as a medium outside of Japan.

In Singapore, though, things have changed. One company, Odex, has scooped up the rights for pretty much everything under the sun, releases absolutely terrible subtitles and dubs, and cracked down on subtitlers. This has driven them bananas, not only because fans subtitling is pretty much responsible for the current state of the form, but because Odex is being given pretty much carte blanche to go through ISP's data records to track people down and sue them. They're pretty gleeful about it, too, despite the distinct possibility that without these hardcore fans, you'll end up seeing anime decline as yet another trend whose bubble bursts.

So, you end up with a rather nasty ethical situation. On the one hand, you have the legal owner of the license, who paid for it and has the rights to it, releasing crap and suing fans. On the other hand, you have people who are breaking the law, who didn't pay for anything, who are nonetheless the backbone of the industry, who practically built it, getting sued through privacy violations that a lot of westerners would find odious. Oh, and the government isn't exactly democratic, either, so there's not a lot of recourse for these guys.

Friday, October 19, 2007

What, don't you get them when you read a headline like Social Conservatives Meet, Their Options Cut by One, followed by a story about how the theocons are losing their minds over the thought that they won't have a standard-bearer in the upcoming election? Brownback's out, Tancredo's going nowhere, Huckabee has an amusing name but that's about it, Keyes is insane, Romney's one of those heathen Mormons and Rudy is, well, RUDY.

And, in many respects, the Republican race is about who's going to lose to Hillary (or, possibly, Obama) and take the blame for the massacre in the Senate. Who would want that job?

(Well, maybe John Howard. At least then he'd be a laughingstock for a party that doesn't mangle the word "liberal".)

Thursday, October 18, 2007

In several of my infrequent discussions of gaming, I've attacked the notion that many people have that games can't be art. There are lots of counter-examples of arresting stories, epic in scope, mounted within a framework of innovative game design.

And then there's Portal. I'm not going to spoil it. What I am going to say is that although it's three hours long, it's still absolutely brilliant. Amazing. Astonishing. Fun, even. It's like the gaming equivalent of a really, really tightly crafted short story with an absolutely kickass ending that raises more questions than it answers.

(There's a longer, spoiler filled discussion of Portal-as-short-story over at Gamers with Jobs. Go read it, but only if you've already finished it, or don't care about spoilers. And you REALLY should.)

It's also hysterically funny, and the ending features the catchiest song you've ever heard. No, really. I defy you to find a more pernicious earworm than Jonathan Coulton's "Still Alive". Even the Weebl crew can't come close.

You know why? Because the single dumbest patent I've ever seen, Amazon's one-click patent, has been struck down by the USPTO.

What does this mean? Well, it means two things. First, expect online shopping to get one hell of a lot easier. Set up an account, click the button, you've bought the gizmo and it's on its way.

Second, this is going to actually have a nice little political effect, as this trick can almost certainly be leveraged for political donations as well. If politicians from a party (let's say the Dems) agree on a combined donation collection system, people who are inclined towards donating towards a candidate can do it incredibly easily. They sign up once to verify that they're a citizen and what their credit card number is, and then bloggers who want their readers to send a ten-dollar "attaboy" to a politician can just throw up the button. Reader clicks, cash is sent (probably a quick little popup to verify might be a good idea, but it should only be one more click at most), reader never even leaves the blog.

(The same could be done for donations to the blog itself, mind. Paypal being able to take advantage of this will be very nice, though I've been a bit off Paypal as of late.)

That's how political donation will be done, guaranteed. That's how it should be done now, but the Amazon patent kind of got in the way. No longer.

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Apropos of nothing, what's with the complete collapse of the gmail filtering system? I've been getting tons of those 419 scammails, and Gmail used to do a damned good job of trashing those things. I don't want one of those silly "emailaddress(typeathere)gmail.com" contact info links, but I may have to if this keeps up.

That's the image I get when I see the various GOP presidential contenders dealing with global warming. It exists, they know it, they have to go along with doing something about it, but they so desperately want it to just go away.

But they can't, because there's a significant number of evangelicals who are starting to get a bit, well, evangelical about that whole "steward of the planet" thing. God gave it to us, and even if He's coming back, He could be well pissed about how it's being taken care of now that He has granted us the power to change it. They need those votes, and screaming about fetuses and gay marriage may not cut it anymore, Christian conservative leaders' loud protestations notwithstanding.

That's probably why they were so desperately hugging themselves up to the denialists, but let's be honest: that ship has sailed. Carping about Gore to the contrary, the argument is over. The question is just what will be done about it.

(Well, except for a few close-minded "asshats", but they're like dinosaurs that think that hiding in a cave will save them from the asteroid strike: doomed, pathetic, and easily ignored.)

The best part is Fred Thompson's climbdown. In April, clearly not realizing that the political landscape has changed, he tried to blame it on solar radiation. That, er, doesn't fly these days. (If you're real curious, go look it up over here. If you're just one of the asshats, go away.) So now he's admitting that it's real, and is trying the "more research" dodge. That won't work as well, but unless they're willing to embrace the battle against African AIDS in a vain attempt to avoid the obvious, like Lomborg, that's about all the serious conservatives are left with these days. He'll come around for the general if he gets the nod. Not that he will, but if he did...

And as for the guy that I personally think will probably win the GOP nod?

In the tangled Republican race, Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Romney have been much more hesitant to criticize policies of President Bush, who in his two presidential campaigns said that more study of climate change was needed before imposing restrictions on heat-trapping gases.

On the campaign trail, Mr. Giuliani has said, “I do believe there’s global warming,” but in a speech on energy in the summer in Waterloo, Iowa, he had hardly a word about the environment. Instead, he focused on tapping domestic sources of energy, including coal, which is considered a major contributor to global warming.

“Ethanol, biodiesel, clean coal, nuclear power, more refineries, conservation,” Mr. Giuliani said. “There’s no one single solution. But each one of these has to be expanded 10 percent, 15 percent, 20 percent.

“America has more coal reserves than Saudi Arabia has oil reserves. Aren’t we safer and better off relying on our own coal reserves than on a part of the world that is a threat to us?”

So, yeah, this has nothing to do with global warming, but is Rudy turning it around into another excuse to yell "NINE-ELEVEN!!" at the top of his lungs for three hours and call it a day. Which might be another way of getting out of the global warming trap, I suppose, but it's really only a button Rudy can push.

The sad thing is that this is the one issue where former frontrunner McCain has actually showed some damned leadership. Here's the Times again:

Mr. McCain said in his speech on Saturday that he wanted to push for alternative fuels, but he implied that more needed to be done to protect the environment.

One priority, he said, would be to establish “cap and trade,” a system in which corporations are essentially rewarded for deep cuts in harmful emissions.

Mr. McCain has written a bill on that and forced two votes, losing both.

In addition to calling for improved fuel efficiency, which he repeated last week in a speech in Detroit, Mr. McCain said he supported an effort to develop an automobile battery that can travel 150 to 200 miles without a charge and would finance the research and development for that.

The senator opposes a measure that many environmentalists desire, a carbon tax, most likely as another gasoline tax. He told the warming and energy conference that he generally opposed new taxes but that he also believed that poor workers who tended to commute to work longer distances would be disproportionately affected.

Mr. McCain said it took a few months of hearings as a member of the Senate Commerce Committee after the 2000 election for him to realize the threat from climate change. Asked about Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Romney’s commitment to energy independence, he said voters should look at their records.

Hate to say it considering what a craven tool he's been lately, but good for John. Sure, he doesn't back a carbon tax, but no Republican is ever going to. You take what you can get. Were he this strong on other issues he might still be the momentum-filled quasi-insurgent that he was back in 2000. As it is, he's right back there with Tancredo.

Not the most encouraging lot, but at least they're admitting that it's real. Maybe something might even get done before people currently living on the coast have to swim to work.

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

I have always maintained that the American public was the least culpable of the players during the run-up to Iraq. The war was sold by a brilliant and fear-fueled White House propaganda campaign designed to stampede a nation still shellshocked by 9/11. Both Congress and the press — the powerful institutions that should have provided the checks, balances and due diligence of the administration’s case — failed to do their job. Had they done so, more Americans might have raised more objections. This perfect storm of democratic failure began at the top.

As the war has dragged on, it is hard to give Americans en masse a pass. We are too slow to notice, let alone protest, the calamities that have followed the original sin.

In April 2004, Stars and Stripes first reported that our troops were using makeshift vehicle armor fashioned out of sandbags, yet when a soldier complained to Donald Rumsfeld at a town meeting in Kuwait eight months later, he was successfully pilloried by the right. Proper armor procurement lagged for months more to come. Not until early this year, four years after the war’s first casualties, did a Washington Post investigation finally focus the country’s attention on the shoddy treatment of veterans, many of them victims of inadequate armor, at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and other military hospitals.

We first learned of the use of contractors as mercenaries when four Blackwater employees were strung up in Falluja in March 2004, just weeks before the first torture photos emerged from Abu Ghraib. We asked few questions. When reports surfaced early this summer that our contractors in Iraq (180,000, of whom some 48,000 are believed to be security personnel) now outnumber our postsurge troop strength, we yawned. Contractor casualties and contractor-inflicted casualties are kept off the books.

It was always the White House’s plan to coax us into a blissful ignorance about the war. Part of this was achieved with the usual Bush-Cheney secretiveness, from the torture memos to the prohibition of photos of military coffins. But the administration also invited our passive complicity by requiring no shared sacrifice. A country that knows there’s no such thing as a free lunch was all too easily persuaded there could be a free war.

Actually, I wouldn't say the country really knows anything of the sort, Frank. A lot of people seem to believe you can cut taxes and raise spending as long as a Republican waves the magic wands of "efficiency" and "market forces" to make the deficit go away.

The most arresting bit might be this:

Our moral trajectory over the Bush years could not be better dramatized than it was by a reunion of an elite group of two dozen World War II veterans in Washington this month. They were participants in a top-secret operation to interrogate some 4,000 Nazi prisoners of war. Until now, they have kept silent, but America’s recent record prompted them to talk to The Washington Post.

“We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture,” said Henry Kolm, 90, an M.I.T. physicist whose interrogation of Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, took place over a chessboard. George Frenkel, 87, recalled that he “never laid hands on anyone” in his many interrogations, adding, “I’m proud to say I never compromised my humanity.”

This certainly fits a lot of what I've been given to understand about interrogation, and it's always been absolutely baffling to me that DoD and the CIA/NSA crowd seem to be more interested in copping techniques from the Vietcong instead of their own forebears. Sure, it's a different world. That the Vietnamese won that war, though, doesn't mean that you should ape their tactics.

One other thing, Frank:

Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we resemble those “good Germans” who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo. It’s up to us to wake up our somnambulant Congress to challenge administration policy every day. Let the war’s last supporters filibuster all night if they want to. There is nothing left to lose except whatever remains of our country’s good name.

Er, yeah, the country's good name is pretty much gone. About the only countries left that kind of support American foreign policy are the Australians and Canadians, and that's only because the latter need the trade and the former suffer under the unique misfortune of having John Howard as their Prime Minister.

(Ok, and maybe Poland. Can't forget about Poland.)

Congress isn't somnambulant, either. They're frightened, chiefly of a chimaerical backlash against progressive foreign policy from a public that is less interested in foreign adventure than they are. The Dems are worried about the Republicans "scoring hits on foreign policy". They never quite manage to explain how, exactly, that's going to hurt them with a public that couldn't give a rat's ass about scorekeeping and just wants this damned war over once and for all. They do it anyway.

That means they're listening too much to the white noise that passes for media and political analysis in Washington these days, and that has always been the problem, hasn't it?

If you want a well-worked-out cost/benefit analysis of action on climate change, watch this:

It's somewhat simplified, but it doesn't make any of the idiotic mistakes and assumptions that Lomborg makes. It's entirely rational, and would meet with an approving nod from any competent game theory-aware economist.

Most importantly, it separates out the things that we know and can control (our response to climate change) and those things we can't know for certain (what climate change will consist of.) Lomborg's mistake is that he pretends to know what's going to happen, and makes a prediction based on that; where this video is smart is showing that even if you aren't sure what's going to happen, you can make your decision based on the expected outcomes.

If you act and there was no climate change, there might be a global recession. That would be bad. Very bad. If you don't act, though, and it is true, the economic, political, and social side effects will absolutely dwarf anything that the economic hit could consist of. The point (which is absolutely valid) is that because we don't know whether or not global warming will happen, and the consequences of inaction if it DOES happen are so disastrous, we should act even if it turns out that nothing was going to happen. The possible negative side-effects of inaction are simply too much greater than the possible negative side-effects of action for inaction to be a rational choice.

(It's a little bit like a modern-day Pascal's Wager, without the "which god?" cutout.)

Now, like most game theory, this video doesn't really address the central problem here: cost/benefit distribution. The wealthy stand to take a disproportionate hit from action, whereas the worst suffering from global warming will almost certainly be by the poor: the wealthy can insulate themselves from the side effects.

Yes, the economic hit may be disastrous for large capital-holders. Whereas labour's pretty much stuck where it is, capital can range pretty much as freely as is necessary. Because of the ease of moving capital these days, it's not tremendously difficult to move your capital away from regions disproportionately affected by global warming, and maybe even make a buck or three from the panicked spending that is sure to arise when the real side-effects of global warming start hitting the globe in earnest.

And, naturally, it ain't the poorest and most vulnerable that Beijing, Washington, Ottawa, Mexico City, Moscow, London, Paris, and all the other big polluters are listening to. It isn't the poorest that are employing hired-gun economists like Lomborg to provide cover fire. It's the large capital holders that want to extract as much wealth as they can before the music stops.

Said it before, I'll say it again: I'm not anti-capitalist or anti-market. Far from it. It's just that any political or economic analysis needs to take these things into account when deciding on who to pressure, how, and why. The video doesn't take that into account, but it's still a damned good analysis of the situation, and I'd recommend it to everyone.

Friday, October 12, 2007

Al Gore was willing to work for the American people. He was willing to put up with all the nonsense, and the lies, and the idiotic policy-free media circus. He wanted to serve. But you people--well, too many of you people--decided to pick the down-home beer-swilling draft-dodger instead.

So he went off and won the Oscar and, now, the Nobel Peace Prize. And he's most emphatically NOT running for president. He probably never will. He's the best president America will never have.

Why?

Because you reap what you sow, America.

Maybe you'll remember this the next time the media starts babbling at you about "earth tones".

Tuesday, October 09, 2007

One of the consistent progressive/liberal critiques of the newsmedia is that they're too responsive to criticism. They pretend to not care, but sooner or later, they move in the direction of the most virulent attacks and disdain, theorizing (I suppose) that the volume of the attacks must correspond to how "un-objective" they happen to be. That tends to benefit conservatives of whatever stripe, because they have both the machine and the temperament to be consistently and constantly loud in their attacks on the "MSM".

Stephen Harper's disdain for the fourth estate has been well documented. His government has allowed less access than almost any before it. In his latest salvo, he is snubbing the annual press gallery dinner.

But rather than hurt him, Mr. Harper - is there method in his badness? - is getting increasingly favourable media treatment. To look at the recent coverage, you would think his government is on a roll. Breathless reports follow breathless reports on how he could destroy all opponents in an election this fall.

That's not bad for a governing party stuck at 33 per cent in the polls for months, one that has fallen six or seven points since it tabled its last budget in March, one that has lost more support in that time than the Liberals or NDP, both of whose numbers have remained stable.

This is usually the kind of news that gets you booed out of town. But, in the case of Mr. Harper, the scribes are doing more cheering than jeering. They look at opinion surveys on who would make the best leader and see that he is far ahead. Given the built-in advantage a prime minister has in such a ranking, any PM who doesn't enjoy a wide spread over a relatively unknown opponent should take up lawn bowling.

As for national polls, given Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion's two weeks from hell, the governing Conservatives should be opening a double-digit lead. But a Decima poll taken last week showed no gain. The Dion Liberals lead the Conservatives in the three biggest provinces, including Quebec, where they, along with the Bloc Québécois, were supposed to be in a free fall.

Other polls starting over this past weekend might well tell a different story. If they don't, Mr. Harper is in trouble - with everyone except the media.

Journalists barely got around to mentioning his low numbers last week. No headline reading Tories Going Nowhere Despite Dismal Dion. Instead, at the first free-wheeling press conference in the National Press Theatre that the PM has deigned to hold, he was serenaded for his shrewdness.

The glowing Harper coverage was best evidenced in the National Post, which makes no secret of its leanings. In a skybox at the top of Page 1 last Thursday, it ran a picture of Laureen Harper with the title, "The Prime Minister's wife was stunning at the NAC gala." The National Arts Centre gala in question took place five days earlier.

Margaret Trudeau couldn't have done better in her prime. Like Pierre Trudeau, Mr. Harper's attitude toward the media is one of intellectual disdain. He's all about reason over emotion. Maybe it's a sly way of gaining respect.

Lawrence Martin goes on to argue that it reflects a media that is conservative now, instead of liberal as it used to be during the Trudeau era. Perhaps, though he gives no reason to believe that. It makes more sense to simply notice the hostility that the PM has had towards the media and judge based on that.

Being a relatively conservative leader didn't save Paul Martin from media scorn; in fact, he was pretty open and accessible to reporters, and they paid him back by being hostile and derisive, no matter their partisan bent. Harper openly hates any and all media that isn't writing puff pieces and/or rewriting his press releases, sincerely believing that they're all liberals and socialists who are just waiting to declare Proletarian revolution, and he's treated with kid gloves.

(Yes, "Blogging Tories" whine about how liberal the media is. That's just because they don't repeat idiotic conservative blogger talking points about abortion being a violation of God's Will and the Liberals eating kittens and socialized medicine being Bolshevism in disguise and whatnot. The only significant thing about them is that Canadian media still appears quite happy to let them vent their spleens on whatever idiocy was Blastfaxed to them from Ottawa and Calgary. They're safely ignored otherwise.)

Harper attacks them, calls them biased and unfair, and they do everything they can to accomodate him. Martin treats them nicely, gives them interviews, plays friendly with them, and he gets slaughtered. How else can you look at this? Sure, Bush played nice with reporters, but he had a whole attack machine ready to jump on the press. Martin didn't, and Harper doesn't really have one either. What he demonstrates is that the machine is scarcely necessary. If the attacks are there, the press will respond. It will carp, bitch, and moan about how unfair this all is, but it'll still dance to your tune. It will, apparently, come crawling back for more no matter how badly you treat it- and the worse the treatment, the faster the response.

Sad. Disturbing. More than a little pathetic. But it's how Harper keeps his good press... and as long as it works, he'll keep doing it. And so will the rest of the Right, wherever it is.

(It does make me wonder what the press strategy of the next president will be.)

Monday, October 08, 2007

Leaving aside the pros and cons of a decision to quit Basra, one of the more disturbing aspects of the withdrawal will be what happens to the interpreters who have been working with the British. The Foreign Office, it seems, is unwilling to grant asylum to the 91-odd interpreters (and their families) who have been working for the British Army, and who can expect to be treated as collaborators and traitors by the militias once the army pulls out. It's a high risk job in the first place; meanwhile Defense Secretary Des Brown is saying that up to 20,000 Iraqis have been working for the British since the invasion in 2003, and that trying to help them is "impractical"...

...Here's my considered advice to the British government: if you think there's even the remotest shadow of a chance that at some future time you'll need to send troops overseas, let all 20,000 of your collaborators (and their families) in. Full right of residence and/or British citizenship, plus a golden handshake sufficient to buy a crappy little Barratt box in a new town somewhere in the midlands: nothing less will do. Because if you don't, you're going to find it a hell of a lot harder to buy quislings and spies eyes and ears on the ground the next time your Dear Leader decides to play Sancho Panza to some doomed quixotic adventure...

....THAT GORDON BROWN WOULD LISTEN.

I just saw Gordon Brown's press conference on the BBC, and Brown announced that the UK would be putting substantial money towards helping those who helped the British forces resettle: in other parts of Iraq, in other parts of the region, or even in the United Kingdom itself. This is exactly what the Foreign Office didn't want him to do; shame on them and good for him.

As for the drawdown to 2,500 troops next year, it's welcome news, though I suspect it will mean that the Americans just make up the shortfall rather than following along with the UK's strategy of overwatch.

Friday, October 05, 2007

It is a distinct pleasure to be able to link to Paul Krugman again, and he's got one whale of a post on his blog talking about European productivity.

Specifically, he's talking about France. France tends to get bashed a lot in the American press and among American conservatives for being an economic basket case. Yes, France has its problems, but then again:

[A] visit to France – and/or a look at the statistics – makes it clear that the French economy gets a bum rap. I don’t want to go overboard here: France has a lot of problems. But it’s doing much better than the American caricature would have it.

French productivity – output per hour – is about the same as ours. What’s more, even during the period 1995-2005 – the years when we Americans were boasting about our productivity boom – French productivity grew only half a point slower than US productivity. And the US productivity boom now seems to be over.

Also, tales of mass unemployment are greatly exaggerated. French residents in their prime working years, ages 25-54, are as likely to be employed as their American counterparts (the employment-population ratio is 80 percent for both).

Now, it’s true that French GDP per capita is lower than ours. That reflects three things: the French work shorter hours; French people under 25 are less likely to be employed than young Americans, and the French are much more likely than Americans to retire early.

Short working hours are a choice – and it’s at least arguable that the French have made a better choice than America, the no-vacation nation.

Low employment among the young is a complicated story. To some extent it may represent lack of job openings. But a lot of it is the result of good things: young French are more likely to stay in school than young Americans, and fewer French students are forced by financial necessity to work while studying.

Finally, the French retire early. That’s a real problem: their pension system creates perverse incentives. We, of course, have this superb program called Social Security, which does a much better job.

So yes, France has problems. But what supersized CEO paychecks – or Hillary Clinton - have to do with avoiding France’s mistakes on pension policy is a mystery to me.

Still, what about the future? Aren’t we surging ahead in information technology?

Um, no. In fact, the US is being left behind in the broadband revolution.

I knew about French productivity being pretty much in-line with American productivity, and I agree with a lot of what he's saying here. One thing that I would note that he didn't, however, is that American productivity statistics are a bit misleading, as a lot of America's most productive salaried workers are working much longer hours than they used to. I'm not sure whether or not these are accurately reflected in American per-hour productivity statistics, as there's really not that much incentive to do so when there's no such beast as overtime pay and even the employees themselves often aren't quite sure of how late they're working.

Plus, there's something to be said for shorter hours in terms of productivity in the first place. The longer someone works (or, even worse, is expected to work), the likelier it is that their productivity is going to crater. They're either going to get distracted, goof off a little to relieve the stress, or simply burn out and necessitate either a vacation or an expensive, unproductive search for a replacement. The best example of this is Japan during the height of its "live for the Corporation" years: the workers worked long hours, but were often very, very unproductive during that time.

The French's shorter hours would be conducive to greater productivity while they actually are working, and a greater quality of life while they're not. Honestly, aside from a slight hit to GDP--that, in America, principally consists of increased compensation to the already fantastically wealthy and slightly greater pay for those with no time to enjoy it--I honestly fail to see the problem.

Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Normally I'm not a "linker" style of blogger, but I'm in no mood for long blather today, so I'll just point you to Charlie Stross' tips for long-haul travel. Flying cross-Atlantic? Cross-Pacific? Or, especially, into the United States from somewhere else? Yeah, you really should read this. Plus, entertaining.

A sample:

Rule #5: Immigration

I have never met an airport immigration desk that was set up to make travelers feel welcome, but there are various grades of awfulness. Entering the USA today has been compared unfavourably with entering Iran, or the Soviet Union circa 1985. It's a very unfriendly experience, but a bit of preparation helps.

You need your travel documents close to hand during your flight because the cabin crew will hand out customs declaration forms and landing cards/visa waiver forms. This is where the ballpoint pen comes in handy, and the address of your hotel, and your passport number. (I said there'd be an exam, didn't I?) Read the instructions on the forms before filling them in, because there's nothing as annoying as being sent to the back of a queue of 300 shuffling jet-lagged tourists at what your body insists is 3am because you forgot to fill it in in block capitals or something.

US immigration will photograph you with a webcam and fingerprint you. They'll ask intrusive and annoying questions and try to spot holes in your answers that suggest you're lying to them.

Do not lie to these people. They can lock you up and throw away the key. The former US attorney general was of the opinion that they could beat seven shades of crap out of you with impunity, as long as they didn't kill you. Until you clear immigration and customs you are an un-person. Admonitions about being polite and playing by their rules apply doubly here. If you give them cause, they will clap you in hand-cuffs and put you on the next flight home. This is not what you suffered through 8 hours of long-haul travel for.

Arthur Silber's writing is often disturbing and always gripping. On occasion, it's also familiar. This is one of these occasions:

one of the standard objections to the likelihood of an attack on Iran is that it will put American troops in Iraq in grave peril. If you make that objection, I have only one thing to say to you: Wake the hell up. Of course it will put American troops in Iraq in grave peril. A great many of them will probably be killed. But -- and please try as earnestly as you can to get this -- the administration is counting on exactly that happening. [Added, to clarify: this must be true, given the logic of the situation, at least implicitly. In individual cases, it might also be true explicitly, in the sense that a particular person is consciously aware of what must happen.] I'm sorry to be rude, but honest to God, how stupid are some of you? Imagine that 500, or a thousand, or even several thousand, American soldiers are killed in a single engagement, or over several days or a week. What do you think would happen?

The administration would immediately blame "Iranian interference" and "Iranian meddling." They do that now. Every major media outlet would repeat the charge; almost no one would question it. Pictures of the slaughtered Americans would be played on television 24 hours a day. The outrage would grow by the minute. Within a day, and probably within hours, certain parties would be calling for nuclear weapons to be dropped on Tehran. Almost everyone would be baying for blood, and for the blood of Iran in particular.

No one, and certainly no prominent politician, would dare to remind Americans that we have no right to be in Iraq in the first place. They won't say that now. Who would point it out after 800 Americans have been killed? And what Democrat would dare to oppose the tide, especially with a presidential election looming? Not one. Everyone with a national voice would be demanding the destruction of the current regime in Iran. No one would oppose such a course.

This had been part of my predictions on how the coming War in Iran was going to go down; that the United States would need to be "eased" into things. You start off with a (relatively) limited engagement, but one dangerous enough that it's likely that bright young American lads will come home in one of those flag-draped boxes. Once they do, you immediately shift the focus away from why they were placed in that position to begin with, to the inhuman monsters that did it to them. Once their Hatfields are seen killing your McCoys, what does it matter why they were there? The point is to get the bastards, every way possible.

That, organically and naturally, opens the door to the real conflict that was intended in the first place.

You don't even need to deliberately provoke a response. None of this needs to be conscious and deliberate. None of this needs to be (or should be) anything other than the same kind of limited attack that you would expect in this sort of situation. What matters is how it's treated afterwards: about how your message machine sorts out white hats from black. You don't even need to "propagandize" for that. The media can be relied on to handle that all by itself.

James Wolcott highlighted both the quality of Silber's work and his dire personal situation. I cannot help him with the latter, though I'm very glad that so many people have; and all I can offer for the former is the blogroll link you can see to the right, and a promise to start paying much closer attention to a blogger I had unjustifiably overlooked.

A political blogger using a pseudonym inspired by both the historical orator and Orson Scott Card's use of pseudonyms in the "Ender's Game" books. For more, see the first post.
No further connection to Card's work is expressed or implied.